Often any decision, even the wrong decision, is better than no decision.
Ben Horowitz
If the employees fundamentally trust the C.E.O., then communications will be vastly more efficient than if they don't. Telling things as they are is a critical part of building this trust.
The laws of business physics have been broken in terms of how many customers you can acquire and how fast. No one in history has ever acquired 450 million customers in the same amount of time that WhatsApp did.
As a company grows, communication becomes its biggest challenge.
Every time you make the hard, correct decision you become a bit more courageous, and every time you make the easy, wrong decision you become a bit more cowardly. If you are CEO, these choices will lead to a courageous or cowardly company.
In my experience as CEO, I found that the most important decisions tested my courage far more than my intelligence.
The important thing about mobile is, everybody has a computer in their pocket. The implications of so many people connected to the Internet all the time from the standpoint of education is incredible.
In all the difficult decisions that I made through the course of running Loudcloud and Opsware, I never once felt brave. In fact, I often felt scared to death. I never lost those feelings, but after much practice, I learned to ignore them. That learning process might also be called the courage development process.
In order to build a great technology company, you have to hire lots of incredibly smart people. It's a total waste to have lots of big brains but not let them work on your biggest problems.
You read these management books that say, 'These are the hard things about running a company.' But those aren't really the hard things. The hard things are when you have to layoff half your company, or you have to fire your best friend. Or you have to figure out a way not to go bankrupt.
Hire sales people who are really smart problem solvers, but lack courage, hunger and competitiveness, and your company will go out of business.
I was an executive running a pretty substantial group before becoming CEO, and I had no idea what it was like. When something goes wrong, people say, 'It's all your fault.' Your reaction is, 'It's not my fault.' But what do you mean? I was the founder, I hired everybody in the company, I was managing it.
Most companies that go through layoffs are never the same. They don't recover because trust is broken. And if you're not honest at the point where you're breaking trust anyway, you will never recover.
Look - this is the terror of being a founder & CEO. It is all your fault. Every decision, every person you hire, every dumb thing you buy or do - ultimately, you're at the end.
I do think a lot of people are trying to do important things still, and I think it is really a great thing that entrepreneurship is getting easier. When I started, it was just much harder to begin a company.
Most books on management are written by management consultants, and they study successful companies after they've succeeded, so they only hear winning stories.
Business ends up being very dynamic and situational.
The bad thing about young people starting a company is that sometimes they do it for the wrong reasons or because they have the wrong skill set, but the good thing is that they don't have any of the old paradigms baked into them, so they have a lot of the bright new ideas that are harder to come by as you get older.
When I was a CEO, the books on management that I read weren't very much help after the first few months on the job. They were all designed to give you directions on how not to screw up your company.
One of the things I say to people is: Imagine if we succeeded.
In life, everybody faces choices between doing what's popular, easy, and wrong vs. doing what's lonely, difficult, and right. These decisions intensify when you run a company, because the consequences get magnified 1,000 fold. As in life, the excuses for CEOs making the wrong choice are always plentiful.
One person is never as stupid as a group of people. That's why they have lynch mobs, not lynch individuals.
The implications of so many people connected to the Internet all the time from the standpoint of education is incredible.
I described the CEO job as knowing what to do and getting the company to do what you want. Designing a proper company culture will help you get your company to do what you want in certain important areas for a very long time.
In boxing, you get hit, it's painful, then you sit on the stool when the adrenaline is gone and you feel that pain. And then you fight the next round.
Good shareholder activists have incredible interest in the company because they own a lot of it.
A wartime C.E.O. may not delegate. They make every decision based on the next product release. They may use a lot of profanity.
I think when companies are struggling, they don't want to talk to the press. The guys who write business books aren't interested in it because nobody wants to learn what it's like to be a mess, you want to learn how to be successful. That's slanted the whole thing quite a bit.
The first rule of the C.E.O. psychological meltdown is 'Don't talk about the psychological meltdown.'
Going public today is fraught with peril on many levels. One is earnings guidance. If you miss guidance, the stock price becomes very volatile. Short sellers can put a tremendous downward pressure on the stock.
I think there's a lot to be said about just enjoying your work. It can be very contrived when people say their work is for the good of mankind.
Some libertarians say, 'Well, if people work harder, they can make more money.' But, you know, my mother is a nurse and I am a venture capitalist. I think no matter how great a nurse she is, she wouldn't earn a one-thousandth of what I can make, if that.
Big companies have trouble with innovation. Innovation is about bad ideas, or ideas that look like bad ideas. That's the fundamental thing.
In my own experience as a C.E.O., I would find myself laying awake at 3 A.M. asking questions about my business, and there weren't management books out there that could help me.
Nobody knows how to be a CEO. It's something you have to learn. It's a very lonely job.
Here's Kanye, the great musical genius of his generation in hip hop, but, like, society really can't even deal with him because he's always saying something that people go, 'Oh, I can't believe Kanye said that. I can't believe he did that.'
Shareholder activism works when activists understand something about the characteristics of the business that the board doesn't.
You have to be responsible when you're running an organization, and firing people who are your friends is part of that responsibility.
When I was CEO, and I'd listen to music, a lot of people listen to music and you get inspiration from it. And a lot of things in hip hop are very instructive for being in business. Particularly, hip hop is a lot about business, and so it was very useful for me in any job.
If somebody's going on your board, and you're going to be C.E.O., it will help if that person knows how to be C.E.O., who has done it before.
Every employee in a company depends on the C.E.O. to make fast, high-quality decisions.
The thing that's confusing for investors is that founders don't know how to be CEO. I didn't know how to do the job when I was a CEO. Founder CEOs don't know how to be CEOs, but it doesn't mean they can't learn. The question is... can the founder learn that job and can they tolerate all mistakes they will make doing it?
Leadership is hard to train on.
You can't worry about the mistakes, because you're going to make a lot of them. You've got to be thinking about your next move.
As long as people are clear on what they need to do and what's going on, you're very likely to succeed. When nobody is clear, then you're guaranteed to fail.
From a systematic standpoint, I think that capitalism is the best system. I can spend a lot of time explaining why I like communism, but it is actually not a good solution. Nor is socialism. So, capitalism is the right model.
If I'm in my position at a company, I may not have the knowledge of the C.E.O., I may not know what's possible, or I may not have the creativity, but if I can identify a problem, that's a valuable thing.
Most of my job and most of what I do is to mentor people. There are a lot of people I work with that I don't have investments in.
With communication technology in general, there's a kind of certain critical mass of people. Once you get to 15% of the world's entire population using one communication technology, that's a big deal. It's beyond the theoretical at this point. The people who think it's a fad have probably not been paying that much attention.
In Silicon Valley, when you're a private company, the entrepreneur can do no wrong.
